18 May 2011

Continuing this little run of wildlife from last week and Monday, this week's HDR is from Rwanda, where this endangered silverback mountain gorilla lives in Parc National des Volcans.

Perched on a slippery vine covered slope isn't maybe the best place to take several bracketed shots of living, breathing - and moving - wildlife, and so this HDR was produced from a single shot, re-exposed and recombined in Photomatix Pro, then finished in Photoshop CS5. Click it to make it bigger.

Our silverback friend presents a good opportunity to introduce a series of posts we'll start here in a day or two. Over the course of a week or so we'll post several short vignettes from Africa, taken from previous safari trips.

21 July 2010

This was a fun day in the Ishasha Wilderness, part of the Queen Elizabeth National Park in Uganda. We were on the way down from Kampala to Rwanda to see the Mountain Gorillas around Mt. Sabyinyo and stopped to see these guys overnight, staying at the Ishasha Wilderness Camp. Ishasha is known for its tree climbing lions, some of whom we'd seen even before we got to camp.

These guys posed for us the next morning in a field full of very wary kob and other smaller animals. For the HDR we re-exposed and combined a single RAW, tonemapped it in Photomatix, added the sepia effect with Nik Software and blurred the acacias in the background in Photoshop.

31 March 2010

A damp fog blankets the clear-cut hills outside Parc National des Volcans in southeast Rwanda as we trek in, two of a group of eight, with an additional crew of guides and porters. We come upon a family of gorillas, but one male remains solitary, arms crossed across his chest. Pensive, it would seem.

If you're going to trek to see the mountain gorillas of Uganda, Rwanda and Congo, time to get a move on.

This week's HDR photo, below, in which our hero seems to fulminate on the encroachment of those demanding humans, visible just on the next ridge, is a perfect illustration of the perils this dwindling community of 800 or so gorillas faces. A report just issued by the U.N. titled "The Last Stand of the
Gorilla - Environmental Crime and Conflict in the Congo Basin"suggests that "Gorillas may disappear
across much of the Congo Basin by the mid 2020s." Download the report, or read a story about it.

Click the photo for a much larger, higher-res version. And continue below the jump for tech details on the HDR photo itself.

06 May 2009

It's standard travel magazine fodder. Over time, Travel & Leisure has variously decided it's Montenegro, Mongolia or maybe Minneapolis, and most recently that I can find, they say it's back to the Bahamas.

We're about halfway through the fifteen year anniversary of the 100 days of Rwandan genocide that began on 6 April 1994 when the then Rwandan president's plane was brought down, and resulted in as many as 800,000 deaths. Today the Kigali Genocide Memorial Center, opened five years ago on the tenth anniversary, tells the tale from a perch overlooking the capital city.

On our own visit to Rwanda, nine months ago, we found a desperately poor country where people queue in villages, even in the shadow of the capital, to collect drinking water in jerry cans. But that vague, uneasy sense of danger (you'll know it if you've felt it) just didn't exist. And, as often in poverty, we found some of the nicest people you'll meet anywhere on the planet.

And then there's the big draw, the Virunga Mountain Gorillas, by far and away worth making the trip by themselves. We've written a lot about the Rwanda and the gorillas, but that was back before we began listing everything on CS&W in a handy index, so here are links to some posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.

Top photo: The cool, verdant Virunga mountains, where Uganda, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo come together. Next photo: The Kigali Memorial Centre. Next: People queue for drinking water outside Kigali. Below: Virunga gorilla.

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